In Utah, it was renegade cows. On St John in the U.S. Virgin Islands? Wild donkeys on the patio gave room service a new twist. There were wild chickens in Bermuda. And the diminutive island of Vieques in Puerto Rico often had the feel of a petting zoo with a menagerie of animals wandering at will.

Running the roads of Vieques took sharp eyes and a little bit of nerve. Thick foliage gave the narrow roads a corridor-like feel at times, and we quickly learned that rustling noises to either side could portend the appearance of a chicken, or more likely, a whole flock of wildly speckled fowl. It was equally possible that the chicken noises would, instead, reveal wild dogs or horses. And so our morning run was undertaken with a greater degree of focus, defensive agility and with our leg brakes at the ready.

Horses and chickens were harder to read than the seemingly well fed and sociable stray dogs, but the tethered horses in the schoolyards did look like a better ride than the typical yellow bus.

In the end, our best response (beyond some impressive vertical leaps) was to run to a beach. Come to think of it, not such a bad strategy at all…

*Most of these photos are lower quality images taken with my cell phone and are not “click-able” to a larger image this time.

A stretch of sand clasps Great Island to the mainland now. But, before the currents of Cape Cod Bay swept the sandbar into place Great Island truly was an island, the residue of melting glaciers.

If Cape Cod were the muscled arm of a flexing bodybuilder, Wellfleet, Massachusetts would be the forearm. Chilly Atlantic waters crash heavily on the open ocean side inevitably tugging down statuesque bluffs in the ongoing rearrangement of sand by Sea. The inner side of this forearm is Great Island.

We hiked the Great Island Trail after a weekend of celebration: a fiftieth birthday and the subsequent reunion of favorite family and friends. Great times. I had run the roads of Wellfleet the morning before and was primed to walk its adjacent shores and marshes before driving back toward Boston.

We followed the Great Island Trail through a pitch pine forest, by salt marshes and along sandy shores adorned with flowing sea grasses. Color was nuanced across a spectrum of gold, brown and russet red, pierced by the brilliant blues of sky and sea.

And as we wandered through its desolate beauty and tranquil seclusion, Great Island still felt every bit the island it once was.

Six months after ankle reconstruction surgery, I had hiked to the top of Handies Peak, one of Colorado’s fifty three “14ers.”* In the previous week, my ankle had carried me high into the San Juans, up vertical climbs to impossibly blue crystal lakes and over treacherous rock slides to exposed wind swept crags.

With my surgical scar hidden beneath the strap of my hiking sandal, none could see the evidence of my three bone and ligament grafts acquired in November of 2012. The few determined hikers we encountered around Durango, Silverton and Ouray saw only a like-minded mother and daughter, paused only for photos and occasional gasps of the thin air.

OK, I may have smiled a little more than the average hiker as I crested Handies —but it’s tough to contain the exhilaration of beating “you can’t.”

* Mountains with an elevation of over 14,000 feet.

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